dream as a world

I don't know if we've think this way: dreams as a bordered world. I began to feel that sometimes in my dreams, many places were familiar only when I was in that dream; but when I woke up they don't make much sense any more. So I'm thinking the only possibility is likely to be that I have only seen them in previous dreams. Thus if dreams are composed like short stories( or long ones ), then is it possible that instead of totally independent stories, the author set them up all in one world, or country, or city? Like in Partners in Murder, Tommy and Tuppence spent all their time in England. Thus those locations only appears in that world. How mysterious.

Gamelan, Samba, and how we learn music

Growing up mostly exposed to the music literacy and Western art music way of training, my recent experience with Gamelan ensemble really has something interesting to say. Samba workshop teaches you in a similar way of Gamelan. This different way of how to learn a new piece, even a new instrument is: while others who are already competent to play are playing the cycles of the piece, the instructor teaches you, show you with oral way of transmission or with the aid of the minimum music notation, how to play. Then you try it, and through the cycles you try to pitch in, and finally you can totally play harmoniously together with others. This is playing by ear.

I was not only fascinated by this mere phenomenon. What was interesting to me is that when I managed to play a few tunes on the Indonesian flute (suling) with the ensemble, the instructor gave me a really difficult piece. He played several times (in fact he took three or four shot before regaining the right way to play, especially rhythmically), and then I began, totally clueless. The difficulty lies both in making the right pitch on a higher octave than usual, and making the rhythm right.

I was only given little chance in this rehearsal to play it and I didn't manage it at all. And then I didn't practice before the next rehearsal, which is two days later. But surprisingly, I manage the tune much better at first shot, and then get better and better, finally almost play right in every aspect, even rhythm.

This ability of human to learn music, or acquire music, is amazing. Without practice and thinking about it at all, one could manage to make significant progress after a day or two than the first try. And without hearing more demonstration in the second time, without more instructions, one could figure out gradually and manage to play in the right way through the cycles that others were playing, though in very different instruments and musical lines. One could just follow the musical implication of others and do the right thing. This correspond with the human's ability to learn language, especially children, when they make a creole complete during their growing up through several generations. It is still a mystery. And in regarding to music, how it is linked to language ability seems not to be clear enough. Its own mechanism, of course, still awaits exploration.

Seeger's mind

As we read and understand and interpret and 'conquer' one after another articles by Seeger, we surely learn a lot of his valuable ideas and concerns. But I'm more interested in the self-reflection part of this endeavor, which we do not usually touch upon. Such issues might include, most importantly, that I want to ask, how does Seeger's mind work to produce these distinctive and worthwhile studies? How does he manage to be so logic, so sharp in observation, and many other of his advanced qualifications as an outstanding musicologist, father and leader of American musicology, and the man who is very advanced in terms of foreseeing issues that will become major concerns in the future, even a hundred years later? Of course some of these might only be explained by the genius theory. The gift that every one of possess is certainly differentiated. Nonetheless, I still want to know, how can way extract some of the essence of his mind? That is to say, for instance, if you are a student of Seeger, you wouldn't just want to understand everything Seeger observed and thought and said, you should not satisfied by only understanding his ideas; in addition, what you want to learn is really how he got these ideas, how he observe things, how he analyze things in an absolutely smart and sophisticated way? How does his mind work, are there methodologies that we could rule out? Because once you're not with him, you've got to discover and create your own ideas and you wouldn't have him aside all the time. This is the thing I wonder. But I'm also skeptical: is this something we can learn?

Schenker, Reti, Chomsky, Lerdhal-Jackendoff, and Pian

Schenkerian analysis deals with different layers of musical structure, from surface to the deepest, reductive ones. Reti and others developed motivic analysis, seeing motif, especially underlying motives, being elaborated in many different ways, as the prevailing force of a piece of tonal music. These two both find the underlying, unconscious structures and patterns in music.

This idea of finding unconscious patterns links to the Chomskian linguistics very strongly. Syntactic theory, for instance, generative grammar, the most well-known Chomskian methodology, is based on this idea. Needless to compare them now technically, I wonder if this could serve as the basic common ground for the similarities and differences in music and language, mostly syntactically.

Two authors I read before actually come to my mind when I encountered Schenker and Reti. L-Jackendoff developed the Generative Grammar of Tonal Music in the 1980s, while that idea comes from linguistics, its application to music cannot avoid catching my attention that it is similar in many ways to Schenker.

The second author is Dr. Rulan Chao Pian of Harvard University, who studied 26 samples of Xipi Animated arias in Peking Opera in a paper that I read last year. Dr. Yung speaks highly of this paper, and it is indeed a sophisticated study. Pian identified several motives that predominantly appear throughout all the musical materials.Again, while her methodology, overtly stated, came from linguistics, one cannot help but notice the similarity to the motivic analysis of Reti and alike, despite the fact that they work in different music idioms and cultures.

It seems that this idea is worth pursuing and many scholars in different areas have actually done their studies on this idea. But first I need to make clear how do they relate and whether do they relate to each others, or they work totally independently. Either way it should speaks of the resemblance on some level between music and language.

Music Typology

Seeger outlines the manner in which these topics, and as a result, folk music(s), have been classified: by nationality, by race, or by language. The most promising of the three appears to be language, although Seeger cautions his audience that “music is not language,” and “as a separate, perhaps opposite or complementary, art, we may have to accept the conclusion that musical traditions cannot be divided as can language traditions”.

For this encyclopedia entry, Seeger attempts organization of European folk music by dividing it geographically by Eastern, Southwestern, and Northwestern Europe; within these three sections he describes musical characteristics and textual sources for folk music in areas divided by language (for instance the Romance languages define Southwestern Europe while the Germanic languages define the northwest).(Hoover Review of Seeger 'folk music' entry in Collier's

Encyclopedia)

Maybe we could first make clear through research how different languages affect their music, as Romance languages and German languages mentioned above, and then we can conclude whether it’s possible to classify musical traditions into families like language families. Without the first step the second step of work cannot be completed.(Shuo Zhang comments)

Charles Seeger as a good man

“And some Fate and Fury should fill all, professional and amateur alike, who have asserted or try to assert property rights over the genuine folk stuff they have collected, with a decent sense of shame. Assertion of property rights in folk music must be somehow stopped. …Genuine folk music belongs to the whole people, and no one, not even if he has paid fifty cents or five dollars to an informant for the privilege of recording or notating it, has any right whatsoever to stand between that singer and the people to which he and his music belong.”

I find that Seeger is indeed a great yet lovely man. His sharp mind and observation, his wit, his concern and care for society and people as well as music and study of music, made him a great scholar and leader in the academia. But more importantly, his kind heart that took care of the majority of the people and their music in this world filled with the corruption of commerce, his many poetic metaphors, his hilarious and sarcastic comments, and many other things, makes him coming out of the page vividly talking to us as a very dear old man. I feel sorry that many people do not get him and his ideas, for there is absolutely countless treasures in his writings, and certainly because his is such a good man that people should get to know. I will consider Seeger as a spiritual mentor of mine and explore and expand his ideas for as long as I shall live. This is an emotional comment out of the intelligent ones that we’ve been making so far.